Ciara Finnegan

Artist

Born in Co. Down in 1974. Studied BA Hons Fine Art, University of Ulster, Belfast and MSc Interactive Media at the University of Limerick. Video works in LUX catalogue collection, Limerick City Gallery of Art Permanent Collection, Northern Ireland Arts Council Digital Media Collection.

Ciara's practice, stimulated by a fascination with language and the mechanics of speech, focuses on the act of ventriloquism and uses this as a means to examine the role of language in the formation and agency of character as well as the responsibility of the speaker and authority of the voice. Ciara is also interested in situations and circumstances where language is deficient, defective or conspicuously absent. Ciara regularly works with her own children to make intimate, unspectacular performance studies and she has been using ventriloquism as a key device in this work for several years. The technique is central to her practice both in terms of the physical act and as a conceptual ground for her work.

Draw Rabby (2013 - ), Ciara Finnegan (UK/NL)A developing project exploring remote, multi-authored, collaborative story-telling through drawing and the generation of a record of these narratives. In the dynamic online visual story-telling platform Draw Rabby in Galleries One and Two (and online at http://drawrabby.tumblr.com) you are invited to draw on a shared canvas, responding to or in some way interacting with the other drawings present. The digital canvas is refreshed daily and its archive held online. Draw Rabby has been developed for the first time as an artwork in a gallery setting for Future Artist-Makers, and as a live artist’s event for the Future Artist-Makers symposia in Nerve Visual Derry and UltraLab in Madrid.